I graduated in June of this year and have been working as one of the first product design interns at Wealthsimple. I heard about Wealthsimple from a friend, who was interning there as a software engineer. So, I started researching the company and the app itself.
After doom scrolling on Twitter as well as just going through the app, I was super interested in the opportunity to work with a team of designers that are just super passionate about learning, experimenting and creating the simplest app to manage your money.
With that being said, I want to just sit down and write about the changes I realized in the design industry and what I have worked and learned about myself in just four months.
To put it in a sentence, it’s more important to make things simple, meaning to cut down things we do not need and not focusing too much on adding delight to products.
A few things I noticed
In the four months of moving between growth and consolidation projects so far, I found myself growing in a fast pace environment, where I kept reminding myself to: restraint, alignment, and being resilient.
Restraint means knowing when to remove instead of adding elements. Alignment means bringing stakeholders to the same page while dealing with complicated projects. Resilience meant starting over, again, and again, without losing track of the pace and learnings.
I think these are the things I improved and allow me to actually ship quality features and interactions, not just designing them.
If it’s not broken…
Throughout the four months, something kept coming up for me.
There’s so much focus on making designs delightful. With the ability of AI, a few prompts can give you the interaction you always wanted as you’re designing Figma frames. A hover interaction, a tilted card, “thinking” states for AI, and more are super common every time I look through Twitter. I’m curious about these trends too, and I’ve tried testing whether I could code them myself. But it made me realize, chasing delight without caring about the quality first doesn’t really help the product. Removing what’s not needed matters more than chasing every interaction.
I spent some time exploring a colour picker on my own time, and trying to make it feel more interesting. Honestly, I just wanted to test if I could code something by myself. Looking back, it was a good exercise to learn from, but it didn’t really add anything meaningful to the product itself.
What works is what works. The phrase, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” really clicked for me during this. It’s not that building things is wrong, it’s just that not everything needs to be built. Sometimes the more useful thing is just to leave something alone, even with a bunch of bookmarked ideas sitting in my Twitter account.
Weekly formulas
Jumping on huddles and jams really saves a lot of time for me. Being at a startup with different teams, each one operates differently, and specifically within the household money management team, there’s more of a startup vibe that wants to ship quickly, which is honestly where our whole industry is heading. I realize that parts of the traditional design process still matter to me, since it’s more about how I adapt to the pace here.
Dynamic filtering and rules in Spend Insights were the first features I shipped, and within my first month I was able to collaborate with Owen and Roman. Rules was a new and fresh idea for the team, and it moved fast because everyone really liked one specific idea, a sentence block. I didn’t have to push for anything, since the room agreed on it early, and it turned out well with a lot of people actually using it.
Budgeting taught me something different. It’s a feature that still hasn’t shipped. It took two weeks of iterating through four layers and flows, and revised at least five or six times between design, product, and content. Design and product weren’t really aligned on it, and for a while, conversations just kept circling and designs went nowhere. What helped was giving the project more structure of its own. I jammed with content, huddled with engineers, and gave async updates midweek to keep everyone honest about where things stood. I also hosted weekly design reviews so we could actually sit with the work together. It wasn’t about speaking up louder, it was about creating the right moments to speak at all.
I think the projects of Budgeting and Filtering Rules taught me something about being an early designer. Half of it is knowing when to speak up, and half of it is knowing when to just sit back and observe. Budgeting was the one that really showed me the difference.
Stubbornness is sometimes the key
As I was finishing up on Spend Insights and getting ready to move onto kids and teens wallets, I was quite hesitant about switching to another team. I had been so immersed in the householding team for around three months that I was a little scared about how I wouldn’t be able to perform as well as I did there. Different teams have different structures, working styles, and priorities, and I was nervous going into it, especially since I hadn’t really experienced this kind of switch at my last internship.
The first week was tough. I was paired up with a very talented senior designer, and our working styles felt quite different at first. A lot of the work was more visually based instead of feature or flow based, which wasn’t what I was used to. I took some adjusting to shift from thinking in flows to thinking more visually. What helped me get through it, and what I still do now every time I join a new team, is setting up meetings and jam sessions more frequently early on, doing research into the product before the actual onboarding day instead of waiting, and just being direct when something’s unclear. I also frequently jump into a huddle instead of sitting with the confusion.
I’m glad our company moves fast, because it means I don’t have to fully reboot every time I switch teams anymore. Over these four months, I’ve been able to jump into new projects quickly and adjust to different designers’ and engineers’ working styles. I was shipping things like growth features and the new onboarding flow along the way.
I think I have become much more organized with how I switch teams. By just going to different teams and moving around, I’ve really gotten to learn more about our product. It’s experiences that is very valuable to me as a growing designer.
What value actually is
Keep it simple is one of Wealthsimple’s core values. But after these four months, I think I understand it a little differently than just a value on a wall.
I really love movies, especially animation. I think a good story and good design actually works the same way.
I think the best products try not to include everything, but know when to cut what doesn’t serve the moment. That’s what restraint means to me in this role. Alignment, of course, was really about making sure everyone’s on the same page, and making sure we’re aligned with each other to really build a thoughtful product together. And resilience was just, I guess, learning that it doesn’t need to be perfect on the first draft, but it has to keep moving based on the pace.
I think keeping it simple, to me, isn’t about doing less just to do less. It’s about really, really understanding what the client needs, so much so that it’s enough for them, nothing extra, just what actually helps.
I’m still early in figuring this out, but I think that’s a good place to keep building from.